The rigging completed, the small band struck up another fanfare; Luther, dressed now in black leather pants with matching vest and black boots, came bounding into the caged-in ring out of the mouth of the tunnel leading back to the penning area. As the music abruptly ended and the applause died down, Luther turned back toward the dark tunnel and casually clapped his hands together once. Instantly, a huge, sleek Bengal tiger emerged from the tunnel as if shot from the mouth of a cannon and raced toward the man standing in the center of the ring with his hands at his sides.
My initial reaction was that a critical mistake had been made-a missed cue or a mistake in timing by the handlers working the tiger cages backstage at the other end of the tunnel-and I sat bolt upright in my seat, sucking in my breath. Animal trainers rarely used blank-loaded guns any longer, but Luther had nothing in his hands, no whip, chair, or cane baton, and no sane man faced a grown tiger with nothing but his bare hands. Luther had absolutely nothing to interpose between himself and the savage missile of fangs, muscle, and claws hurtling toward him. The tiger bunched its hind legs beneath it and leaped at Luther's head as it extended its great paws.
At the very last moment, Luther put his hands on his hips and bowed slightly, no more than five or six inches. The tiger sailed through the air over him, its furred belly actually seeming to brush against Luther's shaved head, and landed on the padded platform directly behind the trainer. It immediately leaped down to a slightly lower platform to the left, sat on its haunches. Even a slight flick of the tiger's paws during its flight could have torn Luther's head from his shoulders, and then these few hundred people inside a circus tent in a desolate area of the Midwest would certainly have seen a lot more for their money than they'd bargained for.
Even as the first tiger was settling onto its perch, a second tiger burst from the dark mouth of the tunnel, and then a third. Each of the tigers executed the same maneuver, leaping through the air only millimeters over Luther's slightly bowed head to land on the platform behind him. As the tigers reared up on their haunches and pawed the air, Luther turned around to bow to them, then raised his arms to acknowledge the applause of the crowd.
Neither Harper-who, like me, knew more than a little about the difficulties and dangers of working with tigers-nor I was clapping. We'd both half risen from our seats in expectation of grisly tragedy, and only now, as the applause began to fade, did I realize that I had been holding my breath. "Jesus H. Christ," I said as I exhaled and slowly lowered myself back down onto my seat. "That is one fucking crazy animal trainer."
Harper said nothing as she too sank back into her seat. She didn't have to. When I glanced sideways at her, I could see that her face was flushed, her maroon, gold-flecked eyes gleaming. I wondered whether it was Luther himself that so excited her, or his masterful handling of the cats, and decided that it was probably both.
Spellbound, I watched Luther work his tigers, using only voice and hand signals. Damned if the man might not actually be the world's greatest animal trainer after all, I thought. Up to that point, the greatest I had ever seen was the justly celebrated Gunther Goebbel-Williams, now retired from Ringling Brothers, who'd worked with an elephant and up to a dozen tigers in a ring. Statler Brothers Circus hadn't had that kind of a livestock budget, nor did this one. Luther might only have three cats, but one tiger can kill you just as easily as a dozen, and I had never, ever, heard of a trainer going into a cage with tigers empty-handed. A whip or a baton might be a puny defense against a Bengal tiger, but the point was that the tiger didn't know that. The whip, chair, or baton was an important psychological barrier between man and beast, the man's scepter of authority. Luther managed to work without anything.
To the unpracticed eye, the tricks Luther did with his tigers would appear simple. In fact, they were anything but. He worked them very slowly, in elegant routines requiring perfect control and concentration on his part, and absolute cooperation and split-second timing on the tigers' part. It was the group equivalent of a top expert skier "walking," virtually in slow motion, down a precipitous mountainside while athletes of lesser abilities schussed past him to the plaudits of onlookers who did not understand that slow can be much more difficult than fast-in skiing, in working animals, and in life. It struck me that, alone among the World Circus performers, Luther would probably have the most difficult time being accepted by a larger circus-at least this particular animal act. The act was simply not sufficiently flamboyant to excite audiences used to faster routines. Luther had opted to turn animal training to an art form that could only be appreciated fully by the cognoscenti.
When he finished, he casually waved his cats, one by one, back into the tunnel leading to the penning area. There was only a smattering of applause by now, but I knew that Luther was the greatest animal trainer I had ever seen, and I found that I was deeply moved by this display of skill, courage, and absolute rapport between man and animal.
Now, standing alone in the center of the large ring, Luther produced a tiny whistle from a pocket in his black leather vest. He raised the whistle to his lips, blew into it. The resulting sound was inaudible to human ears, but the immediate response was the great, trumpeting bellow of an elephant somewhere backstage; the sound seemed to fill the tent with an almost physical presence, making the bleacher platforms vibrate. Luther spun around, then ran across the ring and disappeared into the tunnel.
"And now …" the announcer intoned over the public address system, ". . the monster elephant!"
There was another trumpeting bellow from backstage.
"Neat," Harper whispered in my ear. "He's taught Mabel to speak."
I agreed that it was neat; getting Mabel to do anything on command, with consistency, was neat.
A few moments later, Mabel, outfitted in full, clanging "war elephant" regalia of steel-studded leather harnesses, marched regally through the parted curtains of the entranceway, with Luther riding atop her, while the band enthusiastically blatted out a souped-up version of the Triumphal March from Aida.
Whether or not Mabel was fully earning her keep, she was certainly looking real good; obviously putting away her vitamins and truckload of hay a day and getting her beauty rest. I felt a surge of emotion as I gazed up at the magnificent, multi-ton beast that I had nursed back to health and started to train when she weighed barely three hundred pounds. My little baby had made good. I felt like a proud parent, and I found I had tears in my eyes.
Luther stopped her when she was in front of the first bleacher section and she immediately began to turn in a circle, lifting her knees high as she did a kind of elephant prance I had never seen before. I could see that he was controlling her with a mahout stick, a mahogany pole with a steel hook at the end, prodding and goading her behind the ears to get her to go forward or to turn. As with Luther's performance with the tigers, I was more than a little impressed by his control of Mabel. The proper function of a mahout stick, despite its nasty hook, is not to hurt, for it's never a good idea to get an elephant angry at you, but to more or less focus the animal's attention on what it is you do or don't want it to do. I'd had an aversion to the mahout stick, so I'd used a baseball bat-a Louisville Slugger, Henry Aaron model. After Mabel had started to put on weight and pose a very real threat to my life and limb, I'd found it quite effective to get her attention by whacking her on the tusks with the bat if I was on the ground, or around the head if I was on top of her. Luther, however, seemed to be doing just fine with the hooked mahout stick-but I comforted myself with the thought that Luther was bigger than me.